Apple Continues Rolling Out iWork for iCloud Beta Invites

After introducing iWork for iCloud during its Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple began sending beta invites for the service to registered developers on June 13.

Since then, Apple has continued to send out beta invites on a rolling basis to both paid and free developer accounts. It appears the company has sent out a large batch of invites today, inviting a number of new people to participate in the beta.

iWork for iCloud offers in-browser versions of Apple's iWork software suite, including Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. The software can be accessed from both PC and Mac computers as well as a number of mobile devices.

Developers with both free and paid accounts that have received an email from Apple can access the beta by visiting beta.icloud.com. iWork for iCloud is expected to be released to the public later this year.

Update: Some reports today indicated that the iWork for iCloud beta had been extended to non-developers. The Next Webcontacted Apple, and the company confirmed that reports of beta access for non-developers were inaccurate.

In Europe, any cloud will be a flop. You know: We are very afraid of your NSA organization.

Ha ha. Roll up roll up come and store your cloud data with Uncle Sam so we can snoop on all your secrets. I don't think so. At least the NSA can't hack into my portable flash drive while it's sitting in my pocket.

All this confusion about the future of iWork showcased here and elsewhere is sickening and manages to demonstrate the piss-poor attention to detail Apple rags like MacRumors have. During the Keynote Apple was extremely explicit about the future of iWork (compared to Apple’s usual openness about future plans) – but I guess if it’s not some stupid unconfirmed rumour but something someone from Apple actually explicitly says on stage you people don’t care and apparently don’t listen.

Firstly, no, this browser version of iWork will not replace any other version of iWork, neither on iOS, nor on OS X. (As an aside, this kind of thinking is messed up. It’s so far out from Apple’s approach to apps and web apps and only manages to display your own astounding ignorance about all thing Apple.)

This was explicitly said during the Apple Keynote, right at the start when they demoed iWork for the browser. Quoting: (after talking about the OS X and iOS versions of iWork) “… but today I wanna introduce the newest member of the iWork family – introducing iWork for iCloud.”

It's merely a new member, not a replacement for anything.

Secondly, besides iWork for iCloud, new iOS and OS X versions (the actual apps, not this thing in the browser) were explicitly announced and will be released “later this year”. They were not demoed or shown, but they were announced, even with a rough release date.

To see this we just have to expand the aforementioned quote a bit backwards in time: (after lots of stupid self-praise for the iWork apps) “and later this year we are gonna have awesome new releases of both our Mac and iOS suites, but today I wanna introduce the newest member of the iWork family – introducing iWork for iCloud.”

You can verify this for yourself. It’s at 1h 2min and 50sec in the Keynote video of WWDC.

So, to recap, no, iWork for iCloud is no replacement of the iOS and OS X version of iWork and yes, new releases of the iOS and OS X versions of iWork were announced for later this year.

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